Awesome Stuff: Three Kickstarters From Musicians You've Read About Here Before

from the let's-go-to-the-video-tape dept

Since we began the awesome stuff series of posts about cool crowdfunded projects to check out each week, they've mostly focused on cool physical objects. However, obviously, we talk a lot about music and musicians doing cool things online, and it just so happens that three different musicians that we've written about many times in the past all popped up associated with new Kickstarter projects this week -- though, amazingly, only one of the three projects involves an album. Let's dive in.

Hopefully you are well aware of Jonathan Coulton, internet sensation and all around nice guy musician. We've written about him many, many times in the past, as an example of a musician who really embraced the internet and his fanbase, connected with them in a really genuine way and has built up a hugely successful career as a professional musician while ignoring all of the traditional routes to music stardom. Now, he's teamed up with famed comic book artist Greg Pak to do do a graphic novel based on characters from various Coulton songs. Plus, Coulton is writing a new song for the book as well. My favorite part about this is how this collaboration came to be. You can trace it back to a single tweet:

And people say the internet isn't awesome? The illustrations are also being done by another top comic book artist, Takeshi Miyazawa, so it's basically just a whole bunch of awesome folks coming together, via Twitter, to do something cool that should exist.

Given who is involved, it should be no surprise that it quickly shot past its target threshold, and Pak has already said that due to the overwhelming response, the book is going to be even longer than originally planned.

Last summer, we wrote about the band Secret Cities, when one of its members talked about how wonderful he thinks it is when he finds out someone downloaded his music, even if it wasn't an authorized copy -- because he knows that obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy, and you'll never get fans who like you if you can't get them to hear your music first. The band has never lived together in the same city, and has always recorded in the past on their own computers, sending the various bits and pieces between each other wherever they were at the time. However, for their next album, they want to try going into a studio, and recording it the old fashioned way -- so they've booked a great studio in San Francisco, and are using Kickstarter to (hopefully) raise the cash to pay for the studio time.

They're about halfway to their goal with 15 days to go, which usually means the project will get funded, but it's no guarantee. So you can kick in and help make their dream a reality. The band's got nearly two dozen songs ready to go, and just watch the video above to see how giddy they are about this project.

Finally, we've got an interesting project from Ondi Timoner, a documentary filmmaker, who is working on a really ambitious project called a Total Disruption telling a variety of stories about innovators of all kind. While most of the stories involve talking to various great entrepreneurs (including some of our favorite entrepreneurs out there: Alexis Ohanian of Reddit, Tony Hsieh from Zappos, Reid Hoffman from Linkedin and Bram Cohen from BitTorrent), Timoner recently decided to do a whole series on Amanda Palmer, as she goes around performing the house concerts from her mega-successful Kickstarter campaign.

It's important to note that this is not about creating another 1.5 hour "documentary" with all of these folks, but building an information service / portal that contains as many stories as possible of innovators and the innovation they're working on. This is a sorely needed visual and audio history of some of the most interesting innovations of this era. This project is about 60% funded, with 24 days to go, which is a good sign, but the dollar amount is pretty high, so it may still be a challenge. We love really ambitious projects, and this seems like a great one to check out and support if you agree.